-girish jalihal

Fiction & Poetry

Gyrate, baby
Shake your body to this song of death
It’s rock music with dance beats
A collaboration you can’t deny
Let the riffs get under your skin
Wailing guitars over hellish vocals
With a groove you can’t ignore
Let your limbs lose control
And let the hair go wild
Look possessed
You were made for this moment;
Everything else is a dirty deception
This is your exorcism
I could be the priest you never asked for,
Or the demon.

Rejected by your past
And now you have moved
To a point distant
From where you left off
A once seemingly final
And absolute place
A crippled soul lying in rot
And a newer one shabbily superimposed
And your eyes reflecting
The play of this two layered world
Of distortion and romance
Of confusion and ambition
Of damage and beauty
Of death and destiny
Complementing and contradicting
A war between two selves
Neither is true
And you will never fathom
The complexity
Or the impending disaster
The relative motion of both
Caught in an ebb and flow
Inculcating and appropriating
Snippets along the way
Of left over spirits
And discarded feelings
And hand-me-down love
Under the mercy
Of a vision
Of tomorrow.

Do you know what it feels like? It’s like losing a piece of a completed jigsaw puzzle. When you have seen with complete satisfaction what the whole looks like but now a small piece missing has rendered everything pointless. It’s like that one small void has taken over everything, spread like an infection. It’s just one empty space, just one gap in the beautiful picture, but it feels like it’s protruding like a tumor. It’s like watching your hand burn slowly, while a pail of water lies just there. The emptiness inside burns more than any fire, beginning at the heart and radiating outwards. Till it consumes you. Makes you a part of it. You collapse into your own core like a star at the end of its life. The limbs that would spring into action after seeing them now carry no emotion. It’s like a nail that snapped off a wall and the painting it held crashed to the floor. When a cyclone destroys everything and smashes every castle you built and dreamt of living in but the factor of time continues, on and on and on and on and on. Everything remains the same. But you just lost a piece. And now the picture is ruined. But the most you can do is see the ruins and try to make sense of it. You try to rationalize the tragedy and see if it makes any sense, as a consolation, as an afterthought to all your depression, as a funeral for your guilt, but there’s no coffin for your past.

——

And it’s scary to think of abandoning this. It means you have to leave your artwork. Your creation. Something you both worked on. Because that’s how love works, like a painting. You two work together to express your vision, some like it deep and symbolic, others prefer minimalism, some like it wild and abstract, but abandoning each other is like abandoning your artwork in between. The hardest thing about ending, is starting again. Finding someone with the same vision as yours, who looks at the canvas with the same passion as you, the same perversion and destructive tendencies as you, every stroke of paint is as measured and precise as yours, the same amount of emotion going into it, and as you stand by admiring your work, holding each other’s hands, the painting seems perfect. Time stops. Will you find someone like that, again?

——

A part of your soul has died. A world far away from the real one has just crumbled. You have been jerked away from this heaven and pulled back to the painful reality of mundane existence. It’s like a high wearing off after your first smoke, the warm fuzziness giving way to your cold and rational self. Every interaction with other humans is fake and shallow. You suddenly realize how weak and helpless you are, and how much of life can be drained out of you in a few hours. And you’re obsessed with time. Time, the supreme driver of all reality keeps moving, indifferent to the reactions in your brain and the hormones in your system. Hope and expectations are evil at times like these. Because time doesn’t wait, it discards the inefficient.

He walks alone on the streets
Undeterred by rain and frost
Gaze fixed straight ahead
His eyes alone can reduce cities to dust
No establishment is too big for him
No rules could hold him back
He walks with a rage unseen
Following the stars in the sky
Gods and Kings will collapse
When the ocean inside his heart pours out
The emptiness echoes within
But when he speaks only fire comes out
Behind his mask tears build up
Anarchy is for lovers
This one lost one up
His palm itches to hold his comrade's
They are one,in spirit
But he is alone for now
Ready with a gun to destroy order
And release what society most fears,
Freedom.

He lay back on the bed, his big belly protruding rather vulgarly into the space around him, looking outside the window at the garbage dump nearby. He wished the window had shades so he could avoid looking at the scene outside but rains had covered the glass with fog and it was getting thicker and denser by the minute. He let out another cloud of chemical smoke from his mouth and let his large body stretch and relax. A lot had happened in the life of the towns’ richest businessman in the last few months and he had managed to remain in the news quite frequently.

On the floor sat Rosy (what a cliché name, he always thought), the Eunuch hooker to whom the room belonged, she sat there reading a children’s book about alphabets though she was about 25 herself (Rosy preferred the female pronoun. Being a male meant less business). He was one of the few who actually knew where she lived, he was a frequent customer after all ,and one who did not want to be seen anywhere around the Red Light District.

‘You shouldn’t be sitting with a children’s book, it’s a turn off.’ He said with evident displeasure in his voice.

‘I am all but trying to learn how to read.’

He chuckled. ‘And what do you plan to read?’

‘Rene Descartes to begin with, maybe some Baruch Spinoza and some Voltaire as well. But they are the first ones to come to mind, I have a lot of other works on my wish list as well.’

He was dumbfounded. ‘What does any of that mean anything to you?’

‘It means a lot to all of us.’

‘Why should their thoughts mean anything to a lowly street whore?’

‘Ah, it is simply a matter of interest.’

He chuckled again. ‘And what interested you in them?’

‘A man. He would come here very often, the only other person who knew where I live.’

‘He came here to talk about that?’

‘He came here to talk about a lot of things. You see he was a man full of doubts, and this was his safe space.’

‘Quite a place he chose.’

‘I went to him first, to meet him when I first came to this area.’ She continued, ignoring him, ’I was going through hell and the brothel business was a nightmare. I felt disgraceful, dirty, and imprisoned. But I remember what he said to me after listening calmly to my grievances, words nobody had ever uttered before ‘you live and work in an island where you’re not bound by the chains of morality or expectations, you have the privilege to see the true side of humans on a daily basis, the side nobody reveals in public. You might be confined by your physical environment but you are truly free in thought and in word. Nothing you ever say or think will be blasphemous or judged. You are the symbol of depravity and that in itself means liberation. In thought and in word you are the freest soul.’’

‘That’s an interesting way to look at things’ he remarked.

‘Yes.’ Rosy said. ‘He asked me for my address and I at once gave it to him. He would come here very often and talk to me about the doubts that his life brought to his mind. Grave existential thoughts, the kind of doubts that might have had him removed from society and incurred the wrath of people.’

‘What? Why would that happen?’

‘He was a priest.’

He stared back with widened eyes.

‘Stuck in the wrong profession’ Rosy continued. ‘He had read Nietzsche and Voltaire and Spinoza and knew at once what he should have realized a long time ago. ‘A brothel might be a moral graveyard’ he would say, ‘but religion is an intellectual one.’ He lamented over the fact that people came to him to solve the riddles that troubled them, but his was a troubled soul that never could decide if it could continue living the way it did.’

‘That’s horrible.’

‘Indeed. He would talk to me about a lot of things, about society and its people. He was an intelligent man. He would come to share his feelings, never once did he even touch me. He spoke of you once, too.’

‘What did he say?’ He asked, sitting upright in a matter of seconds.

‘He told me about your recent marriage, that you had married the woman you had been cheating on your first wife with. He predicted the new marriage would fail as well, and as luck would have it, that’s when you started coming here.’ She smiled.

‘Ho…how did know that?’ He asked with a frown.

‘’What do you think makes the mistress so appealing?’ he asked me once and upon my admittance of ignorance he said ‘it’s the fact that she is the forbidden fruit. It is only desirable when it is sinful, the moment the wife is gone and the mistress is yours legally and morally, the pleasure disappears as well.’ When I told him you had started visiting me he had said ‘let’s hope he isn’t foolish enough to marry you as well’’

‘Does he still come here?’ He asked after a few moments of silence.

‘He died two weeks ago…’

‘What happened?’

‘…I was present at his funeral, but I left as soon as people started pouring in.’ she continued.

‘I don’t think anyone would have known you.’

‘I still remember the last time he came here’ again, ignoring him completely, ‘I had told him about all the pondering I had done over his words, about my life and my state of liberation. ‘Good’ he had said ‘contemplation is the beginning of any intellectual journey and also what keeps it alive’. I had remarked how glad I was that God made me this way because I wasn’t confined by gender roles either. He gave me a weak smile, but then his face turned grave and serious and for the first time I noticed how old he had become. ‘I don’t think God cares.’ He had said. And then he left, forever.’

He looked out from the smoky window
At a city that was overflowing like its sewers
The cacophony of tormented souls ringing in his ears
He could see the true face of the people
The city reverberated with their oppressed cry
It was a cry for attention. A prayer for a Messiah.
He saw a thousand blackened and blank faces everyday
Staring blandly at the painted rich bastards
Who spoke of things they never would understand
Never.
The rich man would always turn his head away from their face
Their face
They all had a face, but no identity
Might as well call them the scum of the Earth
He thought how their existence mattered as much as a heap of shit on the road
Or a rotting carcass in a garbage dump
Perhaps as much as the maggots feeding on that carcass
He had seen children picking off food from restaurant trash cans
To feed mothers who were now too old to be whores
He realized how this city is like an orphanage for them
They didn’t know how they came here, they don’t know who their creators are
They don’t know what future holds for them
They don’t understand what makes them any different from ‘normal’ people

The bus stopped. He got off. His orphanage only a couple of blocks away. His shirt was soaked in sweat as he held tightly to his Jute handbag. He entered the roadside Motel and gave the man in charge a nod of acknowledgement. He walked through the dingy corridor that had rooms on either side; the filth on the floor was hardly any dirt compared to the sickness of the activities inside the rooms. The people inside and the people who ran the place or washed its rooms evoked no interest in him, he had learned to ignore them as he had learned to remain indifferent to the negligence that had been bestowed upon him since birth. He had often thought about the slum families and the junkies and the hookers and the thieves and somehow he had always felt like he was one of them, one with the filth that contaminated Earth. He felt omnipotent. He felt powerful.

He entered the toilet and stood at its ventilator. His grip around his handbag tightened. He took out a tattered picture from his pocket that a volunteer had once given him when they had realized he was too old to be adopted. It said ‘Your Savior will arrive’.

He was now looking at the busiest and poshest streets from the ventilator. He knew his moment had come.This was his chance to stand out.To be known. To be a somebody. He took out the rifle from his handbag and held it against the open frame. He saw a young lady standing with her mother near a parking lot and aimed carefully at the girls head. He squeezed the trigger.

There was a splash of red and slobs of flesh flew from her head and splattered on a car behind her. A smile erupted on his face. ‘The Messiah is here’ he thought to himself as he blew the mothers head off with a swift shot. Soon people started running around in all directions. They looked all alike in that chaos, a cesspool, like scum with no identity. He squeezed the trigger again and watched an old mans face disappear with the bullet. He heard cries from within the Motel corridors and loud banging on the washroom door.

‘Can’t ignore me now can you?’ He thought as he shot another one in their chest and watched them collapse into a pool of their own blood.